We should start finishing this issue. May all of you
check the
previous discussion and say if you agree in general with the proposal
amended by MF-Warburg? If so, I would make the next draft.
On Sun, Feb 12, 2017 at 12:52 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 11, 2017 at 6:19 PM, MF-Warburg
<mfwarburg(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
1.2)
Clear-cut situations for making a language eligible for Wikimedia
projects: the language has a valid ISO 639-3 code, there are no
significant issues in relation to the language itself, the population
of speakers is significant, request made by a native speaker. In this
case, any committee member can mark language / project eligible.
This is already
what we are doing. But if such a case should turn out to be
contentious, we would discuss it even after someone marked it as eligible
without discussion. At least that would have been my expectation. So if we
want to make such a detailed policy, could we please add that as well?
Agreed.
1.3)
Approval without obvious formal requirements. No project will be
approved without them.
What does this mean exactly?
Yes, it could be
described more in detail. I thought that we can't
vote about approving a new Wikipedia if they didn't translate 500
MediaWiki messages and similar. I was too lazy to take a look into the
exact conditions for approval. In other words, we could discuss about
the activity, but we can't discuss to approve the project if it's not
written in particular language. And similar.
Ok, this is our current issue with Lingua Franca
Nova and Ancient Greek.
Shouldn't we better discuss about the underlying policy regarding
constructed and ancient languages? A general rule seems better than the
possibility to allow everything by a majority vote.
Yes. But it would anyway
require majority vote. What's the difference
between Ancient Greek and Sumerian? Would we allow Wikipedia in
Sumerian? Classical Hebrew? ...
2.2)
Eligibility of a language without a valid ISO 639-3 code, but
valid BCP 47 code. (Note: this covers Ecuadorian Quechua.)
I don't recall that
we ever discussed allowing projects with BCP47 codes.
Again, isn't this something that should be discussed as a policy?
In general,
we should discuss and (hopefully) approve usage BCP 47
formally, as well. However, it is so wide territory, that it's hard to
make a consistent rule about it: Why should we approve qu-ec and why
we shouldn't approve en-au? Why it's better to use mn-mong for
Mongolian instead of mvf? ...
The combination of 3.1 and 4.1 would be bad
insofar as it allows a 2/3
majority to introduce a new member anyway.
Yes. But that would mean that there is
something really bad going on here.
Yes, Langcom works with the principle that a
proposal is approved unless a
member is against it, in which case the proposal dies (it is not exactly
rejected, n'est-ce pas?).
At times I have been quite annoyed by it as well. I think however that in
general it works quite well. Over the course of the years in which I have
been a langcom member now, I sometimes thought about whether the
“governance“ could be improved. But my personal conclusion always was: not
really. It wouldn't harm to formalize a rule for getting rid of a
theoretical trollish member opposing everything without a reason. But apart
from that? I'm not really sure that introducing majority voting will help
much.
Time and efforts required for arguing with only one person and having
in mind that it's useless makes LangCom dysfunctional. Besides that,
in few years we could have even 100 requests for eligibility per year.
It's likely that 60-70 would be valid, but it's also likely that we
would have to spend extraordinary time on discussion about 10-20 of
them. Even if it's once per month, it would be stressful enough and
lead us into the new period of hibernation.
Besides that, it's not about random persons here, but about people
with enough professional and personal integrity. It is normal that we
don't agree about everything and that we should accept if more members
of LangCom decided to approve the project.
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